National Institutes of Health (NIH)

If you are funded by the NIH…

... you will be required to deposit the final manuscript of your journal articles in PubMed Central (PMC) , and ensure their free availability (open access) within 12 months of publication. Springer journals are perfectly ready to meet this requirement and give you two options to comply.

If you choose to publish your article as open access within the Springer Open Choice program, Springer deposits the final published version of your article into PubMed Central and it is made publicly accessible. The copyright will remain with you and the article will be published under the Creative Commons Attribution License. The cost of Springer Open Choice (USD 3000/ EUR 2200) is – as stated on the NIH web site – a permissible cost in your grant.

If you choose to publish your article with the traditional subscription-based model (without open access), you can notify Springer to deposit the author’s accepted version of your article into the NIH Manuscript Submission System, from where it will be sent to PubMed Central and made publicly available 12 months after publication.

Within Springer’s MyPublication process you can notify us easily (I am NIH funded – ‘Yes’). We require your full NIH grant number and can only process requests with a full and properly formed grant number. An example would be: ‘R01 GM012345-03’.

You only need to enter one NIH grant number. The additional one(s) can be included in a later stage.

We will upload the accepted manuscript version of your article to the NIH Manuscript Submission System (NIHMS). Note that the uploaded article version corresponds to the final manuscript after peer-review and thus, does not include any corrections you will carry out at a later stage (e.g. during proofing).

Once your article is uploaded, you will receive email notification from NIHMS, asking you for approval of the upload to PubMed Central. When you have approved the upload, a web version of the article will be created by PubMed Central. Upon your approval of the web version, the PMCID will be created and can be found in the NIHMS. As soon as the article is displayed at PubMed Central, you will be able to find the PMCID by searching for your article.

Please note that all PubMed Central content is mirrored at Europe PubMed Central. If we submit your article to PubMed Central, it will appear in Europe PubMed Central as well.

If you are employed by the NIH…

... you cannot transfer your copyright to the publisher. Our publishing workflow is perfectly ready to meet this need and will allow you to fully comply.

NIH intramural authors also need to submit the accepted article manuscript to the NIHMS via http://www.nihms.nih.gov/ themselves, so that it is available on PMC 12 months after official publication. Please visit Springer’s self-archiving policy for further details. So NIH employees/NIH intramural authors should not indicate that they are NIH funded (I am NIH funded – ‘No’) as you need to submit the accepted manuscript version of the article yourself to PubMed Central.

Additional information on Springer’s self-archiving policy can be found here.

To learn more about our SpringerOpen, our fully open access journal and book portfolio, please click here.